For someone with a front row seat to the neo-conservative takeover six years ago, Al Gore is remarkably sanguine. I finally got around to watching his movie (sorry, Carlito never promised to be timely), and it was the best modern apocalypse story I“™ve seen since, well, since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans live on television. His case is so convincing that one has to ask, „Why would anyone, faced with this data, deny that there“™s an immediate problem?“ Of course, there are the usual reasons. Short-term gain. Denial. Clings to that SUV ego boost. Mr. Gore addresses each of these in turn, but these merely unwitting or shortsighted accessories to turning Greenland into a puddle aren“™t the ones who interest me. Now someone who would willfully, knowingly suppress data like this, now that“™s interesting. What could drive them?

Theory 1: Suicide.
Drug overdose? Feh! Death by cop? Closer… How about taking the whole world with you? Less ambition examples of this profile might only bring 1, 2, 2000 people along, but if someone were truly interested in eliminating the human race, what better way than to raise global temperatures, melt the ice caps, flood half of the world“™s population and destroy the ecological systems that support the rest? OK, I guess nukes would be easier.

Theory 2: Prophecy
This is the well-known „End of Days“ scenario. The sooner those smug sinners get their comeuppance, the better. When they“™re fighting zombies in the streets, then we“™ll see who“™s „˜cool“™!!

Theory 3: Social Darwinists
There“™s too many of us, there“™s too many of us, there“™s too many of us, there“™s too many of us, there“™s too many, there“™s too many, let“™s have a catastrophicglobalclimateshift!!!

Theory 4: Redistricting by other means
„Ya know, Karl, you“™re right: most of those coastal areas DO vote Democrat…“

Nice article! I think the best thing about the movie might be that it stirs a controversial discussion in the US. Or let’s say: it might be the best thing Gore has ever done for us all (apart from inventing the internet of course..)
The first bonus link is quite…scary?!

i’ve just come back from colorado, and there were many other things that scared and sickened me.
for example the way the heating systems in the houses work (why heat one room at a time? just heat the whole house without any possibility to regulate the temperature in the separate rooms.) and then (many!) people in the supermarket dressed in flipflops, shorts and tanktop with an outside temperature of – 10 c and piles of snow. i don’t want to know how much energy they waste to heat up their cars and houses. i counted around 4-5 solar systems i saw during 2 1/2 weeks (colorado has around 300 days of sunshine per year).
or the absolute impossibility to get anywhere without a car. the way the cities are build makes walking and bike-riding very hard, if not just plain dangerous. and it would also make the building of a public transportation system so expensive nobody would do it.
and the total lack of awareness for environmental issues. even if it takes 20 minutes (per car!) to the next supermarket, people make the ride for every can of lemonade. paper plates, coke/sprite/whatever cans all around.
and the media.“breaking news“ on cnn deal with a rape case at duke university – in total disbelief i watched an attourney talking half an hour about which one of the three guys accused put his dick into the victim’s mouth, anus or vagina. breaking news! and the local newspaper only mentions „world politics“ on two pages after informing you about every birth, death and baseball match in the whole state, which takes about the first 20 pages of the paper.
it’s not really surprising that especially the u.s just don’t want to think about the climate change in other ways than pointing out advantages for the home-gardener.

O.K., I mean this is a first step (maybe the best one) to bring this discussion into public and not every single point must have its scientific explanation in the movie. But on the other hand we have to recognize that the ocean has its own rules and own possibilities to change climate and about 90 % of the ocean are not analyzed yet (and maybe will never be analyzed).

Global warming, we did it, we fucked it up, species are dying, people are dying.. i say ’so what‘?.

About 90% of all the species that have roamed this planet are extinct.
EXTINCT, gone, eons before we even had one single coherent thought beyond ‚can we eat it?‘ and ‚well, can we hump it then?‘ and we THINK, crap, we BELIEVE that we can do some serious damage to this floating rock?

Hell, we couldn’t even kill our own kind, our own species, it is nigh impossible to get every single one of us; don’t mention the oceans, we shouldn’t even discuss the oceans and how little we know about them, it’s bullshit through and through to even THINK ‚uhmm.. yeah.. the depths are something utterly alien to us..‘ when as of now, as we speak, as you read this there are tribes living around the globe both we as laymen and scientists themselves do not know anything about.

I won’t live long enough to see Arizona Bay swallowing LA, no matter how cheerful i’d be that day, it just won’t happen in our lifetimes.

You want to panick?
Sure go ahead but i for one am utterly sick of the self-righteous and above all conceited rant that we can do harm to this planet, any harm at all.
How about that: we have seasons due to a large rock having hit Earth way back when; this thing we call home does a lot of crazy stuff when the stars are right like polar shifts, ice ages and whatnot and you, you guys have the balls to tell me that we are able to do some substantial damage?

Fuck the evidence, you’re reading it wrong, weather’s changing all the time, everywhere, nature is changing all the time, how retarded as a people are we to both believe that shit’s got to stay the same as long as we live, since ‚it’s been that way back when we were kids‘ and if any changes do happen while we’re around it’s because of our primitive fiddling with nature and the climate?

We don’t know how fast climate changes happen without us, we have no clue, we are just guessing, we can only guess.. and we are prone to exaggerate.
Hold on.

„There’s no doubt about that, says Hansen. „The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface.“

How does he know? Did some random god tell him how fast ’normal‘ climate changes usually occur? WHERE THE FUCK DID HE DIG THAT UP?
A volcano can kill everything in a matter of minutes and what a flood can do in a matter of seconds should be still in your heads, next to your mental porn stash.
Climate changes don’t happen that fast?
You know what volcanic ash does to the seasons you all hold so dear and believe to be etched in stone?

If this were live there’d be a lot of spit coming from me.

You want to talk about global warming, fine, end of the world, fine as well but do not expect me to believe you guys one single line you say.

Do we keep track of the weather since the very dawn of mankind? Where’s the data there? Where is it? Who tells you that this global warming isn’t just the usual bullshit this planet does every once in a while?

The weathermen tell you. Great. Meteorologist is (and i am proud to quote Lewis Black) another word for ‚liar‘.

„I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all those French beaches I’d never see. I wanted to breathe smoke. I wanted to destroy something beautiful.“

Ah, just for the hell of it: the data the CDIAC presents lack just two things: they can’t say anything about the global mass of vegetation in the decades the three ice cores are from, since vegetation is linked to average carbon dioxide levels in the air and they can’t say anything about the temperatures on a global level, since temperature is directly linked to gas pressure, which means that most of the carbon dioxide will be absorbed by the sea mass of the southern hemisphere during colder periods.

In other words we’re looking at the egg and the hen; either the surplus carbon dioxide is due to us or it is due to a global weather change we have little contribution to which led the sea mass to releasing the absorbed carbon dioxide of earlier periods.
Or, which is even more fun: due to the carbon dioxide we as a people are producing, the climate’s changing, the oceans are releasing their absorbed CD, thus leading to CD levels that will keep rising even if we’d manage to bring our industry to a complete halt (not to mention our cars, surplus cows and whatnot).
Another interesting fact is the volcanic winter Europe and America experienced from 1816 to 1819 and the climate changes of 535—536.

THAT was fucking scary.

Keep an eye on another thing: back in 1800 there were like 1 billion of us walking around, farting, eating and dying while nowadays there’s some 6 billion of us (not to Carlito: don’t give me the right numbers, i don’t give a shit for decimals) doing the same things.

Thus the proper eco-system had to be created to sustain these numbers; termites do what we do on a smaller scale.
All natural, as it is.

The three ice cores do tell me that carbon dioxide levels are rising.. they just fail to say why.
Yeah, global warming, sure, why not, the data still lacks the proper data to be put in the right context.

I don’t even do as much as doubt that the weather’s way beyond fucked up, i just think that climate changes are something quite normal.
Of course, not for a species living as short as we do.

Remember: mankind is a by-product of nature, there is no „we against nature“, we are a part of it; we just take ourselves too seriously thinking that we can actually do damage at all.
Yellowstone comes to mind. Eighteen hundred and frozen to death as well.

Shit’s linked to everything, to everything else, not one scientist on Earth can tell you that there is one single cause for everything we’re witnessing and keeping a straight face while doing so.

Uhm, it’s a lot more complicated than just to say that it’s global warming going on around us; it’s just the lack of additional data putting it all in the right context that bugs me.. oh, yeah, and the people who are just happy to be given one single useless answer.

I am not, i repeat, not trying to piss you off Carlito, it’s just me wanting to force people to think and ask questions, every question there is and it annoys the fuck out of me to hear someone say the words ‚global warming‘ without knowing one single thing about anything ‚global‘ (not you, people at the grocery store for instance).

In the end we’re among sheep, yesterday’s ‚baaaa‘ has been replaced by ‚global warming‘.
Bugs me, bugs me, bugs me.

Folks should learn to ask questions again, not to shut up when they’re being hit with scientific facts.

Wedge, no offense taken: I’m always happy when people read Hudsonblick. I think your opinions of the science may be colored by your opinions of some of its proponents. I hope that you re-examine the data available, become convinced that there can be a catastrophic, human-triggered climate change, and then STILL rail against doing anything about it. I, personally, would love that! ;-)

In recognition of this scenario, I have added a new class to my taxonomy above (number 5). PROST!